The 1651 Act and Dutch commercial power

The Rump Parliament's 1651 Act followed unsuccessful discussions about an Anglo-Dutch alliance and even a possible union after the stadholder's death. Cheap Dutch shipping could undercut English merchants, drive owners out of business, and shrink the domestic market for ships and seafaring labour. That contraction would make English shipbuilding scarcer and more expensive while weakening the industrial base on which naval construction depended. The commercial competition also created a strategic fear: a country dependent on another state's merchant fleet could lose practical control over the movement of its own goods.